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PEMCo to perform ‘Nothing Without You’ revue

The Pasquerilla East Musical Company (PEMCo) will present “Nothing Without You: A PEMCo Revue,” featuring 20 students performing numbers from a wide variety of musicals.

Sophomore Emily Okawara, the director of this year’s show, described the revue as an annual PEMCo tradition in which students perform a compilation of songs from different musicals, each connected by a common theme that changes each year.

“This year’s theme is ‘Nothing Without You,’ and it’s all about human connection, and how, living on this earth, we are all connected in little, tiny ways in our daily lives, but also on a bigger scale,” she said. “All of the proceeds go to charity. This year they’re going to a program I’ve worked with all year, called ‘Engaging Youth, Engaging Neighborhoods.’”

“Engaging Youth, Engaging Neighborhoods” is collaborative project between the University and the Neighborhood Resources Connection, a nonprofit community organization dedicated to providing programs to empower the community and train community leaders in South Bend.

“It’s a program that uses the arts to empower youth to make their voices heard,” Okawara said. “It’s very humanizing research, and very connected to the revue in the way it’s using the arts in the community. It’s a program that I really care about.”

Each performance will run for approximately an hour and a half, including a 10-minute intermission. Okawara said like revues in past years, the show was organized, produced and directed entirely by students, and will feature live musical accompaniment also provided by students. Unlike prior years, however, this year’s revue will take place in a new venue.

“For the past few years, it’s been in the LaFun Ballroom, but this year it’s going to be in the Washington Hall lab, which is different and cool in a lot of ways,” she said. “It’s just a different stage-space. We get to use lights, and it has more of a theater-y feel.”

Supporting the arts in your community is very important, Okawara said, but coming to the “Nothing Without You: A PEMCo Revue” means more than just supporting your fellow students who are helping produce or performing in the show.

“With this revue, you are supporting the arts directly, but you’re also supporting the arts in that all the proceeds of the revue are going to go towards this program that supports the arts for kids in South Bend, so it’s kind of a double-whammy,” she said. “In addition to supporting the arts, it’s just going to be a super fun show. There’s a lot of really popular musical theater in it. We’ve got ‘Hamilton,’‘Mamma Mia,’‘Hairspray,’‘Wicked’ — all the well-known titles — but there’s also a lot of new stuff in it that I think people are really going to want to see, that I think gets to the core of the joy and the grief and the gravity and the importance of human connection.”

Junior Denise Dorotheo, marketing producer for PEMCo, elaborated on the theme for this year’s show.

“The idea is that we are nothing without human connection, nothing without being able to have relationships with friends or family or be in romantic relationships, and how those are essential to being human,” Dorotheo said. “We thought it was a really good theme for this year because we are struggling right now, as a society, of being very disconnected, whether it’s our political views or anything like that, or just being on our phones when we’re with one another. We’re just trying to remind the Notre Dame community how important it is to have relationships with people, to share differing opinions with people and to listen and be respectful of those.”

The performances will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, as well as 4 p.m. on Saturday. Tickets are available for $5 at the LaFortune Box Office. Seating is limited.